People, Place and Power: Australia and the Asia Pacific edition:1 pages:57-79

Article number:

4

Abstract:

This article argues that Japan’s early modern financial political economy is insufficiently
understood by means of the bulk of Western economic vocabulary. In particular, Japan’s
apparently contradictory policy of ‘financial autonomy through dependence’ must be
understood as a natural ramification of social Darwinist semantics of “catching up” with the
Western powers. For Japan, as a late developing country, the significance of its financial
development as exemplified through its adoption of the gold standard was that it allowed the
large-scale import of foreign capital for modernisation through industrialisation, the conduct
of large-scale wars, and the pursuit of empire.